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In an effort to help clients optimize their value chains, Ciklum has launched the Product Ownership Program. This two-day program consists of a series of practical workshops based on best practices from 100+ software development teams both inside and outside Ciklum clients’ network. With its Product Ownership Program Ciklum aims to “bridge the gap” between clients’ IT and business goals and provide Product Owners with some simple tools that allow both low fidelity details and a full overview of the product functionality and user interaction with the product.
“Business should drive software development, and software development should enable business. This is, of course, the goal of any software company, but all too often business and development become disconnected from one another,” says Yuri Lapin, Head of Ciklum Consulting Office. “This is an old problem, well documented since the 1980s, but in today’s market of short time-to-market cycles, the negative effects of a Business/Development imbalance are increasing. There is no silver bullet, but Ciklum’s Product Ownership program (ciklum.com) comes pretty close. A large and growing pool of Agile teams and extensive experiences able to quickly solve typical development problems while maintaining business continuity make us uniquely suited to align clients’ business and development goals.”
Many Ciklum customers have applied Agile methods and adopted Scrum or other methodologies with the help of Services & Consulting Office, Ciklum’s Center of Excellence and internal source of qualified value adding services. Making IT teams deliver regularly is a first step in optimizing the whole value chain. At certain moments bottlenecks occur outside the IT arena, and speeding up the development team becomes a sub-optimization. The next step is the focus on business optimization and improving the way Product Ownership is done.
Ciklum Product Ownership Program does not provide plain theory, but focuses on practices and exercises that have already been applied and tested before in numerous Agile teams. It makes the Program’s experience and knowledge distilled. During a two-day workshop participants gain skills and knowledge needed to develop a strategic roadmap of the product development and prioritization of tasks.
According to Yuri Lapin,“many business managers playing the role of a Product Owner have noticed significant improvements after applying methods proposed in the Product Ownership program. They spend less time on technical questions and focus more on business priorities. Sharing the product understanding with the entire team lets them set realistic release goals and maintain a strategic plan for product development.”
IT teams in turn gain a better understanding of business decisions and become more open to change. Applying the knowledge and practices received through the Product Ownership Program, they become more committed to achieving business objectives and suggesting alternative solutions to better meet business goals.
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